Winning with The Lesser: Part 2, Dragyri Slave Special Edition!

We’re back with Part 2 of our tribute to the oft-overlooked Slaves. The powers that be decided the newer sub-factions, Shadow and Earth Castes, deserved their own section and it’s not hard to see why. For Shadow, they actually don’t employ slaves AT ALL, and instead use a unique combination of refurbished C.O.R.E. models and trained Spiderlings. And as for the newest addition, Earth Caste, well… they play so different from the other factions we just have to take special interest on how they use their likely well-treated slaves.

SHADOW!

Unlike Fire, Shadow doesn’t do a lot of damage but also is probably the most resilient Caste. Because of that, Shadow is in a unique position of being more focused on completing secondary objectives. You can be more cavalier with slaves, as Shadow can protect even its small models with Blind and Smoke status effects. Just remember that the grunts’ purpose in Shadow is to try and handle this workload on their own.

The ‘other’ slave choices:
For anything that requires a Psych Check, the grunt models of Shadow are not really going to be able to help out. However, Vault and Strider make the Lesser Spiderling mobile enough to grab just about anything else. If you are going for a Toxic build, Lessers are also a good way to get those counters up.

For the Shadow Menial Bot however I’m not sure I’d assign him with the duty of objective grabbing. Instead, this is a good point filler to add just a little bit of extra melee combat for the point investment. Remember that gang up is counted even for Retaliation strikes.

MY slave choice:Greater Spiderling

My pick however is miles ahead of both of the others however, and it comes down to two words: Spike Shower. This is one of my favorite new abilities. “Give all enemies within 2” 1 Blind Counter.” Spike shower is a crucial piece to a successful mitigation Shadow list and the fact that you can get it on a 50 point model is insane!

Earth Caste, with its current limited number of units released, is really difficult to play (though satisfying). To illustrate, I spent a week with a friend slowly moving pieces across a board to theory-craft ideal positioning for Earth psychogenics and abilities and I feel like I barely scratched the surface.

Now, if you want a thorough read-through of my thoughts on early Earth Caste releases and tactics it can be found here but in summary slaves can make playing Earth a lot easier.

The ‘other’ slave choices

Earth seems to be a counter-striking faction. IE they want their opponent to set up, attack them and then they react. Their slave abilities all have Knockdown, which combo well with this.

But models like the Spear Slave and Sling Slave aren’t going to feel much different than they do in other Castes. Spears will engage and hold enemies in place until you can hit them with something heavy. Slings will strike from a distance causing status effects and minimal wounds. Both set up other abilities like Finishing Blow from knocked down foes.

MY slave choice:Shard Slave

Shard Slaves are what can really bring Earth together and it’s because of abilities like Knockback and Psychogenics like Ferrous Pulse. Knockback itself can be fun but it is much better if you can knock an enemy into something that explodes.

Placing Shard Fields are a Shard Slave’s sole purpose and make for great targets but they also count as Terrain. Ferrous Pulse can only be cast onto terrain, but it pushes all non-Earth Caste models away from that point. So with a careful combination of the two, you can set up to push enemy models (or maybe even a friendly model from another Caste!) wherever you want. I will warn you though, this does take a ton of practice.